Die A Little Part 12

The eerie, wavering pitch of her voice unnerves me. s.h.i.+very like a zither in a monster movie. She sounds as if she can scarcely hold on to the phone, barely make the words come out of her mouth.

"Is there anything I can do, Lois?" I find myself asking.

"Sleep tight, baby. Sleep.tight, let's call it a day," she murmurs, half-singing.

"What were you calling Alice for?" I say. "Did you need some help? Is everything okay?"

There is a pause, a faint sound of contorted humming, then a clicking sound, like a drawer sliding on its runners, open and shut.

"Lois?"

I clutch the receiver as my stomach rises anxiously into my chest. I get a sudden feeling of monumentality. I whisper one more time, hardly a whisper even, "Lois, are you there?"

"Yeah?" she says at last. I take a breath.

"Lois, why don't you tell me where you are and I can come get you and bring you over here?" I can't believe I'm saying it. But if not me, who would go? Who would go?

"Me? I'm on a fast track to nowhere, baby," she says, then laughs lightly. Then, suddenly, "Would you come by? Would you?"

Then, "G.o.d's honest, I'm afraid he's gonna come back, and he said if he did he'd bring the pliers this time."

The car keys I've unconsciously palmed drop to the floor with a clatter and I nearly lose the phone. Breathing deeply, I force out, "Tell me where you are, please. Please tell me"-and I am suddenly half out of breath-"where you are."

The Rest E-Z Motel in Culver City. I drive by it three times, hands tight on the steering wheel, trying to steel myself. On the phone, Lois said she didn't know what room she was in. She said she couldn't get up to look at the door. I will have to try to find her by talking to the clerk.

The place looks about as I had guessed when she told me its name. The s.h.a.ggy carport leading to the lobby hanging so low it seems nearly to hit the tops of the stray cars that move underneath. Gray s.h.i.+ngles cracked in the sun, and bloodred trim caked around each window and awning of the dozen or so rooms.

My legs shake as I walk across the parking lot. It doesn't strike me until that moment that there is every reason to believe this sort of thing happens to Lois five times a week and she emerges each time with only her usual number of scratches.

The clerk, a Mexican with a cigarillo and a bowling s.h.i.+rt, looks me over dubiously from behind a grimy counter. He scratches the back of his neck.

"h.e.l.lo. I'm looking for a friend. She called me from here, but she was ill and wasn't sure which room she was in."

He blinks slowly and raps his fingers on the counter.

"She's small, maybe five feet two or so, with dark hair." I gesture with my hand.

His lips twist around the cigarillo. His fingers rap more slowly, and he shakes his head.

I open my purse, hands shaking slightly. "I'd be so grateful for any help you can give." He shakes his head again, raising his hand to me.

"Really." I slide ten dollars across the counter, Mike Standish style, not knowing if it is what Lois might call a b.u.m amount or the real deal.

He sighs, rubbing his hand along the bristle on his chin, then takes the bill, slipping it into the waistband of his pants as he steps from behind the counter. I jump back with a start, but he is only gesturing for me to follow him. We walk out the gla.s.s door and across the flyspecked parking lot, over to Room 12.

He knocks once on the mud-colored paint of the door. No sound.

He looks to me expectantly.

I knock this time. "Lois? Are you there, Lois?"

No response.

"Look"-I turn to the man-"she's really sick, can you-" He pulls a pa.s.skey out of his pocket and unlocks the particleboard door.

My eyes adjust to the dark room, with its nubby curtains pulled tight across the bulging screen of the window to block out the late-afternoon light.

Mounds of sheets piled on the bed, a faint red-brown spatter curled into one of the rivulets.

"Lois," I blurt, unable to make it past the threshold. The clerk begins muttering loudly in Spanish.

Abruptly, amid the piles of sheets, a torn-stockinged leg surfaces. "Whossit?" I push past the clerk and move quickly to the bed. Lois is huddled in one corner, locks of hair matted to her face and clotted in a thin sheen of dried blood.

"Are you all right? G.o.d, Lois."

Her dark-ridged eyelids slide open, and a sheet-creased breast slides out from under the covers.

"Alice?" She squints.

"It's Lora. Lora King," I say. I turn to the clerk. "Thank you."

He pauses a long second, deciding something, probably about whether or not to call the police. Then he points a finger at me, turns, and leaves, closing the door behind him.

The room is in near darkness again, a dusty, heavy kind of late-afternoon dark. Street noises radiate in and out, carried by the hot winds.

I sit down on the edge of the bed, next to her.

"Lois, let's go. Let's get you your clothes on and I'll take you over to Alice and Bill's. Or to my place. Your pick."

She puts a hand over her eyes and says nothing.

"We can call a doctor from there," I add, trying desperately to see the source of the blood in the darkness. "No doctors, sugar pie." She rolls over and tries to prop herself up a bit.

I reach across to the bedside lamp and switch it on.

Lois rubs her eyes and manages one of her crooked smiles. A cigarette burn snarls from her collarbone.

"Oh, Lois!"

Her eyes widen a bit, then she looks down at the burn. She smiles.

"Oh, no, that's old, honey. It got infected, never healed right." She struggles a blue-veined, dimpled leg out from under the sheet. A garter hangs loosely atop her thigh.

"Now that's new." She smirks, pointing to a long, crimson strand down the inside of her upper thigh.

"Lois," I murmur, feeling dizzy and sick, suddenly aware of the smells of the room, the bed, a fulsome mix of bodies, drink, the slime of a lost evening and half day.

"Ah, it ain't so bad. You should have seen the other guy." She chuckles wryly, tiredly, and gestures to the spray of dried blood. "Busted his nose."

"What happened?" I cover my mouth and nose with the back of my hand, unable to hold back my nausea. "Lois, what happened?"

Her eyes light up and she is onstage, the cameras are rolling, something.

"The kind of dance you're lucky to make it out of, toots." She reaches over to the bedside table and, with a growing jauntiness, pops a cigarette in her swollen lips. "It just happens. And then happens again. But it's a walk into the lion's den. We've all got our soft spots."

Taking a puff, she squints at me and says, "Did you ever feel something in the dark and it gives you tingles, pinp.r.i.c.ks under the skin, like ice on your teeth followed by a warm ... a warm, velvety fist?"

I don't say anything. I feel my stomach and face go suddenly hot. I run the back of my wrist along my forehead.

Lois reaches under the sheets to pull out a silky violet dress. Throwing it over both her head and her sagging cigarette, she wriggles into its wasp waist, then turns to me.

"Honey, don't worry. I've had my insides scooped out clean after four bad turns and the clap. I've seen things and done things, had things done to me, things that..." She slides out of bed, looks down at her legs, scaled a bit on the s.h.i.+ns with dermat.i.tis. "There's a lot I can get through. You, you'd best deal with your demons just the way you do now."

I turn sharply, all the way around to face her.

"You know," she says, through the smoke. And that is all she says. I don't know what she means, but I feel, with a shudder, that whatever she thinks she knows is probably true.

"Where are we going?" Slouched down in the seat, Lois s.h.i.+fts a bit, eyes closed to the glare of pa.s.sing headlights.

"La Cienega. And Manchester. With the donut on the corner.

"Why don't you let me take you to Alice's? I think you really need to see a doctor."

She fumbles in her ruched pocket, eyes still shut.

"Lois?"

I try again. "Lois? Can't you let me take you to Alice's at least?"

She plucks a fresh cigarette, partly crumpled, from her pocket and punches in the car's lighter.

"I'll get taken care of where we're headed, honey. Don't worry."

We drive in silence, listening only to the dull thud of the car over the ridges in the road. Eventually, Lois, now sucking her cigarette with vigor, turns on the radio. As the bra.s.sy music leaps out, she begins to gain energy, sitting up straight and humming along.

Finally, we approach Manchester and the ten-foot-high pink-frosted donut, sprinkles the size of baby legs.

"Turn left. It's the bungalow on the right there. The one with the chair."

There is an orange velvet armchair on the front lawn, a magazine on its cus.h.i.+on, pages rippling in the evening breeze. A large radio is perched on the bungalow's porch and is billowing out what sounds like old Tin Pan Alley.

Lois is halfway out the door as I turn off the ignition. I begin to step out of the car when she swivels around and looks at me.

"Thanks, kid. Don't think I don't appreciate it."

"Let me make sure someone's here to take care of you," I say. As I head toward the porch, I think suddenly, as I see her there bone white and battered, that she is slipping away right in front of my eyes and that n.o.body will take care of her at all.

It seems to me, for no reason I can name, that if she walks up those porch steps and sets her s.h.i.+very foot across the threshold, she'll sink into something even more terrifying than what I found at the motel. The jabbing strains of the radio-was it "Tiny Bubbles"?- seem to be pulling her in through sheer hypnotic force.

"I'm okay, honey." She turns and nearly falls up the steps onto the porch. With this, the screen door gapes open with a groan, and a tall woman with a tepee of dark red curls appears. She offers a long glance at Lois.

"Oh, it's you." Her eyebrows rise. I move a few steps closer to the porch. Lois smiles crookedly at the woman but says nothing.

"And who's that?" She gestures at me imperiously. Closer, I realize she is an older woman, maybe fifty.

"I'm a friend. I think Lois needs a doctor."

Lois, making her way past the woman and through the doorway, looks back at me without expression.

"I'm fine," she slurs with a brittle edge, turning back away from me and disappearing into the deep red shadows of the house.

The woman looks down at me with her hard, made-up features.

I return her gaze, unsure what to say.

She appraises me a few seconds longer, then turns, the bustle folds of her dress swinging behind her as she, too, disappears into the house. The screen door sighs back into place.

I stand there for another minute, even lean against my car and pretend to fidget for my keys. I don't know what I think might happen, but nothing does. Nothing I can see.

I settle into my car and, before leaving, jot the address down on a sc.r.a.p of paper, not knowing why.

As I make the long drive home, all the women's faces along the boulevard seem to have the same look as Lois. Every one.

How can it be that, two days later, I'm in my brother's car, feeling ugly with fear, and Bill ... Bill, still numb from Edie's death and Charlie's abrupt exit, wants to talk, inexplicably, about sister-wife relations.

"Sis, I know you love Alice to death." He turns the wheel delicately, with two fingers. "But can you try to show it a little more?"

We are driving to our G.o.dparents' for dinner. Alice is in bed, the middle of a new round of daily migraines. It makes it easier. It lets me puzzle things out without the distractions of her sidelong gaze.

"What do you mean," I say.

"Lately, she feels like you don't want to spend time with her. That you're distant," he says, eyes on the road, voice soft and coaxing.

The day before, when I ran into her in the teachers' lounge, she stopped me, one spiky hand on my shoulder. "I hear you helped Lois out."

"Yes."

"Thanks. Thanks for that."

Her face was as static and flat as a photograph. I felt a quiver dancing at the base of my spine.

"For what? I'm sure you would have done the same," I replied, and as I said it I realized it was filled with meaning for her.

"Oh, yes. But she's my burden, not yours. And thanks for not telling Bill."

In a flash, anger came over me. I wanted to say, How dare you? "That's not why I didn't tell him," I said, voice brittle. "Not for you."